90% of African Internet Content Is Hosted Outside Region

Content delivery networks (CDNs) play an integral part in the management of internet bandwidth. And as the internet gains wider acceptance in Africa, providers are adopting CDN services to create seamless access of content on the internet. For example, the use of Facebook on the region has grown significantly.

But Facebook doesn’t have any local offices in the continent and therefore relies on CDNs to deliver an acceptable experience to its African users. Mark Tinka, engineering boss at SEACOM, acknowledges the benefits of CDNs. He notes that the next phase in the growth of Africa’s internet will be centered around content and services.

“The next step will be to host more content within Africa, rather than in Europe and the US – 90% of African internet content is hosted outside the continent today. We’d like to see that figure reversed so that 80% or 90% of content is hosted within African,” says Tinka.

The promise of lower latency and faster speeds within the region will make it viable for service providers in the region to host content within Africa. Other efforts towards making the continent’s internet more reliable have included investments in carrier-neutral data centres, open peering internet exchange points, national and regional fibre links and submarine cables.